Update: Found ‘Vietnam veteran’ exposed as fraud

Vietnam War POW Sgt. John Hartley Robertson was purportedly found alive and well 44 years later. (Photo via The Independent)

Update: The story was exposed as a fraud, according to The Independent, which published the original report. The man calling himself U.S. Army Sgt. John Hartley Robertson is believed to be a Vietnamese citizen of French descent who has made a history out of claiming he is a U.S. Army veteran.

***

Original story: In 1968, U.S. Army Sgt. John Hartley Robertson fell into the jungle, his helicopter shot down over Laos in a top-secret mission during the Vietnam War. If Hollywood had its way with the script, the Green Beret would have been welcomed home a hero after a daring rescue. In reality, history presumed him slain, relegating his name to war memorials and funeral pamphlets.

The documentary follows Vietnam veteran Tom Faunce, who, while on a humanitarian trip to Southeast Asia in 2008, heard tales of an army brother forgotten by his own government and left to start a new life in Vietnam. At first, the filmmaker set out to debunk these claims and expose the man as a poser. But the evidence seemed to suggest otherwise.

“The MIA story was pretty unbelievable, pretty grandiose,” Jorgenson told the Daily Mail. “Tom went to meet him and was very skeptical, grilling this guy up and down, trying to get him to break.”

Through a translator, the 76-year-old man tells his account: How the North Vietnamese captured him after his helicopter crash, how they trapped him in a bamboo cage and tortured him for years. Eventually, his captors released him, physically and mentally broken. A widowed woman found him lost in the jungle, nursed him back to health and eventually married him. Taking on his wife’s late husband’s identifying information, he registered as a French-Vietnamese citizen named Dan Tan Ngoc.

Another surprising twist about the supposed rediscovery is how the American family reacted. Instead of submitting to DNA testing, his sister says she’s happy to simply assume this man is Robertson while the woman who’s possibly his American wife inexplicably dropped out of participating in the documentary midway.

But stories of missing soldiers rarely end with much closure, and here’s one that at least seems to have come close enough.